I’m confused why backups would even matter. Are the servers physically hosted in Mali and the government seized them?

Because if the government just invalidated the domain, that’s completely different. In that case a server device with everything on it still exists in the same place it always did, it’s just DNS that has changed.

(And yes, I understand that losing the domain name and the certs attached to it would be a big deal, but there’s no data loss, hence no need to pull from backups.)

I know you mean like drinking and dancing, but in my head I’m like “yeah my chess club DESERVES a nice building”

That’s pretty cool.

I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.

We’re doing great though! Good trajectory.

First of all, it would never be applied to all of Lemmy, that wouldn’t make sense and isn’t really possible considering how federation works.

Second, automoderation is a necessary tool to deal with a flood of users on many subreddits, and it belongs in place. Each community has to make its own decisions about how best to moderate, but without automated tools they’re just going to drown. The net effect then would either be to shut down the community or allow the community to exist with no moderation at all.

You do. not. want communities here with no moderation at all.

Encourage communities to use tools that are sane and give you options for interacting with the community, and which don’t harshly penalize you for small issues with your posts, but what you are de facto asking for in this post is chaos for any large community.